Who said drinks and cemeteries don’t mix?

Some of us served drinks at a cemetery on Tuesday. As part of their annual Solstice celebration, the beautiful Forest Hills Cemetery asked LUPEC to serve up a drink of our choice to some odd 250+ attendees. In honor of a Forest Hills “permanent resident”, Lucy Stone, we made Stone Rickeys, and the crowd ate ’em up (and we, er…ran out).

Pour the gin, lime, orange, and simple syrup in a highball glass three-quarters filled with ice. Fill with club soda and stir. Garnish with mint or orange slice.

The Stone Rickey was created by Dale DeGroff. The original Gin Rickey (a much drier drink with no sugar) took it’s name from “Colonel Joe” Rickey, a lobbyist in Washington in the late nineteenth century who regularly drank with members of Congress in Shoemaker’s Bar. Colonel Joe also became, interestingly enough, the first major importer of limes to this country. The early Rickey recipe first appeared in Modern Mixed Drinks, by George Kappeler, in 1900. According to DeGroff, the expression “stone” or “California Sour” has come to mean a sour with orange juice added. The Stone Rickey recipe listed here has been adapted by LUPEC Boston (less sweet, less orange, as noted by *) to suit our tastes and to fit the more austere spirit of the revolutionary Ms. Stone.

Lucy Stone was a pioneering suffragist and abolitionist. She was the first Mass. woman to earn a college degree, and the first in the United States to keep her name after marriage (thus the coining of the term “Lucy Stoners” for those who did the same.) She was a leader in organizing the first national woman’s rights convention, held in Worcester, Mass. The speech she delievered there is said to have converted Susan B. Anthony to the suffrage cause… She worked as an organizer and speaker for the American Anti-Slavery Society, and through this included radical speeches on women’s rights. Apparently not content to settle for all the aformentioned “firsts”, Stone went on and became the first woman in New England ever to be cremated.